God's Mercy is Goodness

Not an hour before writing this, I was scrolling through Instagram and found a video of various people crossing the finish line at the New York City Marathon. A man in a turbin painfully sprinted across the finish line in determination. A couple was reunited and a proposal was made. The elderly took their final steps across the checkered pavement and triumphantly raised their arms high in the air. A son and father lifted their paralyzed mother out of her wheelchair and helped her walk across the line. People laughed. People cried. People crossed themselves and kissed the ground. I have very little desire to live in New York City, and, yet, in this video, I saw that fabled American melting pot, that spirit of unity that only grew stronger under crisis, that heart of the people. I saw the reason many believe NYC to be the greatest city in America, and even the world. What I saw in that video that reduced me to weeping on an unsuspecting Tuesday morning was the goodness of humanity.

Aside from hosting the NYC Marathon, November is also Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month. Personally, I find myself split on the matter of our society’s focus on mental health in general. On one hand, I believe overdiagnosis runs rampant throughout our society. In my college department, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t depressed or anxious or bipolar or all three at once. They traded their conditions in the hallway like baseball cards as if popularity contests weren’t based on looks or athleticism but on trauma. Their superlatives were Most Repressed Childhood, Best Perscription Collection, and Most Likely To Fake A Suicide For Attention. Then again, I did go to school for theater so maybe my sampling was a bit skewed. I’m sure that many of these students were suffering in one way or another, and for that, my empathy is with them, but what has always irked me is how it seemed like some distorted version of virtue-signaling when compared to my own experiences with the reality of poor mental health. In contrast to the flashy mental crises that I witnessed in college, I have personally come to know the true realities of the issue. Do not mistake my disdain for performative trauma as apathy for the subject in general. Far from it, I know what true depression looks like, and feel a sense of injustice when it is sensationalized and taken advantage of to sate one’s thirst for attention. Real mental health issues are often silent and, especially for men, can have deadly ends.

What I have come so intimately close to that has given me this perspective is loneliness. Just as pride is the root of all man’s evil, loneliness is the root of all his sorrow. Loneliness does not mean being physically alone. A man can be in a room packed to the gills, even with his friends, and still feel alone. Loneliness is the result of the perception of a lack of affirmation. Men look to be needed.¹ As has been the case throughout all of time, men have been the providers, the protectors. However, in a society that is hellbent on tearing down traditional gender roles and often views any masculine trait as toxic, men are left to feel out of place, or worse, demonized for something they cannot control. In this, the loneliness is compounded because men are not only degraded, but they are helpless to do anything about it. They are told they are worthless, can do nothing to prove their worth, and can’t change what it is inside them that is deemed worthless in the first place. Worthless and helpless - this is loneliness.

The lack of affirmation creates loneliness, and the lack of self-worth caused by loneliness creates depression. But what creates the lack of affirmation? One could say it is the lack of community, family, purpose, or a significant other. These all contribute heavily; however, the greatest cause of this lack of affirmation is sin. When we sin, we push out the ultimate source of affirmation: Jesus. We betray and turn our backs on the only one who can ever truly satisfy us, the only one who has the authority to give us worth, and the only one who will never fail to do so. Even when we sin, God is still calling out to us as sons and daughters. We just refuse to listen. We do not allow His affirmation into our hearts. This is why despair is a sin; it is when we willingly ignore the affirmation of our creator and fail to uphold faith in His goodness.²

Perhaps my theory as stated in the previous paragraph is wrong. It doesn’t matter. The outcome is unfortunately still the same. Even if we find an emptiness within ourselves through no fault of our own, our souls cannot exist as vacuums. No man can worship no gods. May it be His will that we would fill our souls with Him, but how often do we instead turn and fill our souls with evil and sin as cheap comfort? One path leads to joy and peace, while the other to corruption, despair, loneliness, depression, and, in the case of 40,000 American men every year, suicide.

This loneliness by brokenness is something we are all susceptible to, myself most of all. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I watched that video of the runners in New York City, the weight of my own loneliness fell on me like a great mass of stones. So much guilt and fear and loneliness suddenly coursed through my heart that I fell into weeping, but I didn’t know what I was crying about. I feel into a sadness I had not felt in a long time, an emptiness of spirit suffocating to the emotions.

Then I understood. The noise stopped and all was quiet. Softly, the trumpets of the God of Peace began their calls. They responded to one another in their crescendos and I began weeping ever more deeply, but no more bitterly. I saw, cresting over the horizon like the gentle morning sun, what I was crying about. It was all the goodness. I saw in that video true community - the vibrant glow of unity among many people - and I understood what we humans had been given. What I felt was Jesus Himself reaching down and holding me. He was telling me that He was not far off, but that He was with me. His end for me may be the sunrise over the horizon, but He flooded around me like the warm rays of the sun. He told me that he understood me and that, especially in my pain, I wasn’t alone.

I took out my rosary and immediately began praying. Being a Tuesday, I began meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries, but despite the pain and suffering of those mysteries, I could not help but feel a powerful resilience, a hope, a joy. In that moment, Jesus was showing me the beauty of His suffering. All at once, I saw Calvary as a place I wanted to follow Jesus to, for it held in it something so indescribably good, something beautiful.

During His crucifixion, Jesus underwent the most intense physical and emotional duress possible. He was being tortured and led to his death. His friends had betrayed and abandoned Him. As a human, He experienced this suffering to the fullest extent of agony, just as we all would. Further, He fully understood the metaphysics of His situation. His death would not merely kill Him, but it would unleash the full weight and malice of the sins of all mankind throughout all of history onto Him. As God, He could feel every sin as a strike against His soul. How was He able to bear this? Is it merely because He was God? That explanation isn’t good enough. I refuse to believe that Jesus had some divine threshold that automatically dumped any overflow of unbearable suffering so that He could maintain His faith. He had no superpower, no emergency drain in the dam of His soul. His humanity exposed Him to the worst of His physical suffering and his divinity opened Him to the worst of His spiritual suffering. It wasn’t easy for Him just because He was God. The Father didn’t just send down a magical shield to protect his body and heart. So how did Jesus do it?

Jesus was able to bear the full weight of evil because He also knew the full reality of the good of humans. Every time He almost fell, he saw something good: Veronica wiping his face, Simon helping him carry the cross, John and his mother, the good thief. Just as he could feel the weight of all sin with each blow from the centurion’s flail or each strike from the crucifier’s hammer, every time he looked into the tearful eyes of those around him who showed him love, He could see the full goodness of us all. This was the boon of His divinity. Just as He could feel the full weight of all human history’s sin, He could also feel the full strength of all human history’s love and goodness. I think He could hear the trumpets of Heaven and see every moment where we were or would be courageous against sin. He saw us picking up our crosses and knew that we were doing so after His example. He saw his children standing up to the darkness and evil of the world and saying through shaking voices, “No. You cannot overcome the love in my heart.” He felt all the love we were and are capable of and He knew perfectly where it came from: Himself. This vastly outweighed the evil in the world and tipped the scale. This is why He was able to make it. This was how God gave Him strength. Throughout the pain and loneliness and brokenness that He felt, the joy He felt in our goodness that we learned from Him, and the love that we give to Him made Him feel not alone. He knew, throughout it all, that He was needed more than anything. It gave him hope. Just like you and I need hope.

As I sat with my rosary in my hand, looking out my window towards the gentle blue sky with tears in my eyes, I realized that in my sorrow He felt just like me, except the weight on my soul was my own sins and the weight on His soul were the sins of the Earth. We both cried for it. We both belonged in those tears. We then cried for the goodness. For the beauty. When He was atop His cross, I could see that He looked out and saw in the distance, underneath the storm clouds, the blue sky. He saw the good of His children. He gifted me with that sight, not because I am worthy, but exactly because I’m not. That’s how He shows His love. Despite my sins, despite the lowliness of my soul, He took me and said, “Look into the goodness of the world. It is all for you.” That’s His mercy to me. That is His forgiveness. No anger. No shame. But instead a gift. A gift that showed me who I was and who I was meant to be. He gave me a look into His love for humanity and told me to share that.

It took me two weeks to finish writing the first draft of this article, which you are now reading. I have a feeling it will take me the rest of my life to finish it, and even then it will not be completed. That satisfaction will only come after death, when I may sit with Jesus and He may reveal to me the true words to write to explain it all. For now, I will do my best and wait. I admit that my thoughts wander throughout this article. Perhaps it is because they know the direction but can’t fully see the way yet and so they take a few wayward turns on their way to ultimate realization. All I know is that I am not articulate or educated enough to prove my theory of goodness on the way to the cross. I just know it to be true. He showed me. But it was also what he said afterward that I want to include in this article. He said, “I show this to you so that you may show it to others.”

1 I should stress that I am in no way an expert on the differences between the psychologies of the two sexes. In fact, I would tend to sway towards Jordan Peterson’s explanation of the two sexes as being mostly similar with the differences falling in the extremes, i.e., while the average man or woman is similar at the center of the distribution of personality types, the small sliver of extremely assertive personality types on one far end of the scale are mostly male and the small sliver of extremely agreeable personality types on the other end of the scale are mostly female. In any case, I would think that most women desire to feel needed as well; however, their archetypal responsibilities do not include providing to the same extent as men and so it is, perhaps, less manifest in their psyches. Just to be safe, let us all remember that I am a foolish twenty-six-year-old bachelor and take what I say on the matter of the sexes with a grain of salt.

2 While I believe as a Catholic that faith in the Lord will bring us peace and self-worth, I cannot ignore the reality that we are imperfect beings and perfect faith is not something so easily attained. I think in many cases, while despair is a sin, those who are brought to despair are not fully culpable, if at all. Life, for the unlucky, can be a series of heartbreaking events. The child who is bullied and falls into sadness should not be scolded for his or her lack of faith. Rather, Jesus must be brought to him or her through Christ’s body: the Church, us. One of the most powerful ways that Christ affirms us is by using each other to do so. That is our obligation as Christians. We must support each other and affirm each other’s worth. What a beautiful way of imitating Christ and truly bringing Him to those in need.